Pentium M for the Desktop: AOpen i855GMEm-LFS & DFI 855GME-MGF

Running system benchmarks is
not SPCR's raison d'etre, nor even our normal practice. Still, we wanted
to get an idea of the capabilities of this processor and chipset
combination, and to compare the two boards. All benchmarks
were run with each system in default configuration. FSB and multiplier
were set at the stock speed of 100 x 20. Vcore was left at default, which
is 1.324V. Each board was run with the same set of peripherals, except for the CPU coolers, running at 12V.

We also ran some of these benchmarks on a standard P4 system.
All hardware was the same except for an Asus P4P800-D motherboard, a 3.0C Northwood
P4 CPU and a Thermalright SLK900 heatsink. The same vidcard, memory and HDD
was used.

We used the full
registered version 2005.1.10.37. Benches run were the Math, Multimedia and Memory
Bandwidth. All the tests were run at default settings. Math and multimedia benches show
the 2.0GHz Pentium M holding its own against a 3.0GHz Northwood. Memory performance
is lacking, but that's not unexpected since the Pentium M memory is running
in single channel mode at a slower speed than the memory on the P4 board.

Next we ran some FutureMark benchmarks. We used registered versions of
3DMark 2003 (v.3.50, patched), 3DMark 2005 (v1.10), and PCMark 2004 (v.1.20).
All tests were run at default settings.

We also ran the PC Mag / ZDNet series of benchmarks, the Business Winstone
2004 (v1.01), 3D WinBench 2000 (v.1.1), and CD WinBench 99 (v.3.0). All tests
were run with their settings at default. The Pentium M boards performed almost
identically.

The Pentium M boards perform almost identically,
and give a 3.0GHz P4 system a pretty good run for the money. Each board was also used as my day-to-day system for about
four weeks. For the most part, the P-M seamlessly replaced my normal 3.0Ghz P4
system. Subjectively, the only slowness that I noted was on HDD-intensive tasks,
probably due to the 5400 rpm notebook drive
used. Overall, the performance of this 2.0GHz Pentium M was very impressive.